What happened to John Powell? Part 2

Note:  This is a continuation from a previous post.  To start back at part 1, click here.

On Tuesday, February 5, 2019, I had taken the day off work to take my husband for some medical tests.  When the tests were finished, we were at CVS waiting for a prescription to be filled when my Apple Watch buzzed to alert me to a new e-mail.  The first thing I saw on the screen was a name - John Powell.  JOHN POWELL??  I immediately pulled my phone out of my purse to read the full e-mail:

Melanie:

Your Michael Everett Powell showed up yesterday as a Y-DNA match for me. We have a genetic distance of 0. That means we match all 37 markers and likely have a Most Recent Common Ancestor in the last several generations.

Can you tell me what you know about Michael's ancestors?

My family tree is public at both Family Finder and Ancestry:

a. Family Finder: [url removed for privacy]
b. Ancestry: [url removed for privacy]

For the family trees above, you, of course, will want to follow the paternal line.
I look forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards,
John Powell

Oh, my gosh!  How exciting!!  This meant that my father's Y-DNA results had come in, even though I had not yet received an e-mail from Family Tree DNA stating so.  It also meant that my dad had at least one Y-DNA match who was previously unknown to me - a match who was not Jack, Jimmy, or Nicholas Powell.  I immediately attempted to access the family tree links that John sent me, but the websites didn't want to load correctly on my phone's browser.  I knew I would have to investigate further when I got home, but I was way too excited to wait until then to respond.

Hi John,

Thank you so much for writing! Michael Powell is my father. His father was Everett Powell, and Everett’s father was James Edward Powell, born in 1891 in Aiken, South Carolina. We believe James’ father’s name was John Powell, but after almost 10 years of family history research, I have very little information on him. It appears that he married Hattie Gregory in about 1890, fathered James, and then disappeared. I wrote a blog post about him here: https://unzippingmygenes.blogspot.com/2019/01/john-powell.html?m=1

You will also see more info on my blog about my tree. I will write back shortly when I get to my computer to send more info and tree links, but I am sitting at CVS right now waiting for a prescription and was too excited after receiving your email to wait to respond.

Thank you!
Melanie (Powell) Nowend

When I got home from the pharmacy, I had yet another e-mail from John.  That e-mail helped to make several of the pieces fall together and busted through the brick wall that for years had been firmly lodged on my family tree in the position of my 2nd great-grandfather.  I now finally had answers to some, but not all, of the questions that had plagued me for so many years.

Oh, yeaaaaah!

John provided lots of valuable information about other connections he had made in the Powell family line.  He apparently had already reached out to several other Y-DNA matches (who, as it turns out, were also matches to my dad) and had gathered a wealth of information from those matches and from others researching their Powell lineage.  He generously shared that information with me, and also encouraged me to join the Powell DNA Project on Family Tree DNA.  John also gave me the name and e-mail address of another researcher who could share even more information with me.

But the most valuable piece of information that John shared with me was a name.  A pair of names, actually.  John wrote that he suspected that we connected via the Charles Powell family of Edgefield, South Carolina.  Charles Powell's wife was Ellen Johnson.

Charles Powell and Ellen Johnson.  I immediately recognized the names.  In fact, I already had a LOT of information about this family.  I had researched them extensively.  Charles and Ellen Powell were the paternal grandparents of John Powell #1.

John Powell #1 was my 2nd great-grandfather, after all.  I had been searching for him for years, and he was right under my nose the whole time.  I had initially thought that he couldn't be my ancestor, because it appeared that he was married to another woman, Belle, in another part of the state around the time of his marriage to my 2nd great-grandmother and his son's birth.  However, I have since discovered that there were several flaws in my research.  The John Powell who was married to Belle in Saluda, SC is a completely different John Powell (we'll call him "John Powell #2") than my John Powell #1.

John Powell #1 was listed as an inmate in the State Hospital for Insane in Columbia, South Carolina at the time of the 1920 census.  Sadly, his brother, Henry, was also an inmate at the same time.

1920 US Census, South Carolina, Richland, Columbia Ward 4, District 0090

John Powell #1 had been an inmate in the state hospital since at least January 1918, and he remained there until his death from Huntington's Chorea on October 22, 1922.

Meanwhile, John Powell #2, who was married to Leila Belle Williamson was alive and well in the 1930 census in Saluda, South Carolina - eight years after John Powell #1 died.  Therefore, John Powell #2 (John R. Powell - and yes, that is, in fact, the letter "R") could not be the same John Powell as John Powell #1.

1930 Census, Dist. 016, Ridge Spring, Saluda, South Carolina

Same Name Confusion

Early in my genealogical journey, I made several mistakes that many beginning genealogists make:

1. I assumed that because the names, ages, and locations were similar or the same across different documents, they must all refer to the same person.
2. I accepted the transcribed record as fact without investigating and questioning further.
3. WORST OF ALL - I adopted "facts" from others' online family trees without researching them for myself and finding the documentation and citing the sources to back up the claims.

A combination of these three errors caused me to miss what had been right under my nose for years.  As I stated in my previous post, there were MANY men named John Powell in South Carolina during this time period.  Since receiving the initial e-mail from the currently-living John Powell, I have gone back and done extensive research on six men, all named John Powell, all living in South Carolina in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, yet all completely separate individuals with different family lines.  Two were married to women nicknamed "Belle" (Leila Belle Williamson, listed above and married to John Powell #2; and Rosabelle Thornal, married to John A. Powell ("John Powell #3") and living in Columbia, South Carolina).  Two lived some portion of their lives in Columbia, South Carolina (John Powell #1, who died at the State Hospital in Columbia, and John Powell #3, who lived in Columbia for much, if not all, of his life).  One is a John A. Powell (#3), and one is a John R. Powell (#2); however, because the above 1930 census record was mis-transcribed as "John A. Powell," the records of these two men are often combined as if they are the same person.  Upon further investigation of the full 1930 Saluda census record, it can be noted that the census-taker often wrote his Rs with a large flourish on the left-hand side, causing it to look like a letter "A":

1930 Census, Dist. 016, Ridge Spring, Saluda, South Carolina
This is a sample from the same page as the previous clipping, showing Raymond Jordan and Labrew Raiford.  Note how the census-taker wrote the letter "R" in both instances.

Further, because John Powell #1 was hospitalized and died in Columbia, SC, he is often confused with John Powell #3 who resided in Columbia with his wife and daughter.  And because both John Powell #2 and John Powell #3 have wives named "Belle," their records are often combined.

Is your head spinning yet??

Because of all of this same-name confusion, many (almost all) of the family trees on both Ancestry and Family Search have inaccuracies regarding each of these men.  Long ago, when I first began searching for my John Powell, I took several of those inaccuracies as gospel and dismissed the evidence of the very ancestor that I was searching for.  Thankfully, DNA was able to help me wade through some of the insanity.

However, several questions still remain.  I now know that John Powell #1 is my John Powell, and that, sadly, my 2nd great-grandfather died in 1922 in the State Hospital for Insane.  At least one, possibly two, of his brothers also had the same disease he had.  Thankfully, it does not appear that this disease was passed through the family line, although at least one of my grandfather's siblings had Parkinson's, which is a related disease.  But where was John Powell in 1900 when his wife, Hattie, and son, James Edward, were living with Hattie's mother?  Hattie apparently told the census-taker that she was married and had been for 10 years.  So where was her husband?  And what were the circumstances which led Hattie and John to divorce?  Was it related to John's illness?  Hattie is remarried to John Preston Hatcher in the 1910 census (while John Powell was still living), so there should be a divorce record.  Alas, it is likely going to take a trip to the Aiken and/or Edgefield County courthouse to obtain these answers.  But until that is a possibility, I will continue my online research to attempt to fill out this branch of my family tree.

More on that to come...

For part 3, click here.